Dean Ayala’s Hearthstone Q&A Recap #40 - Theorycrafting Streams, 4 Expansions Per Year, New Hero Skins
Theorycrafting Streams
- „This won’t be a popular thought, but our stance is that there are more people positively impacted by getting some ideas of what they should play than there are people negatively impacted by ‚hype-loss‘“.
- „There is a thought that the meta is figured out faster because this event exists, but there isn’t any evidence of that being true to any meaningful degree.“
Hearthstone Expansions
- The team feels that the number of cards that come out as a result of the mini-sets now is in the right spot.
- There are considerations to move Hearthstone to 4 expansions per year and no longer do mini-sets.
- Reward structures would need to be redone to support shorter expansions.
- There is „some very cool stuff“ coming in Expansion 2 & 3 this year with regards to new card types.
Voyage to the Sunken City
- The Colossal mechanic is considered a new type of card.
Cosmetics
- The team wants to have random cosmetics available as an option across all game modes.
- There are no plans to make Battlegrounds cosmetics available for gold.
- There is a new type of Hero Skin in development that will get a different treatment to its Hero Power.
- The current version of Hero Skins will continue to exist.
- The more cool a cosmetic is, the longer it takes to create which means there is less of them they can produce.
Events
- Recently, the team has been brainstorming limited-time events that would bring back old favourites in Standard.
- „Like if naxx invaded the whole game for a month, what does that mean?“
New Class
- If another class is added to Hearthstone, Dean expects it would be a part of an expansion like Demon Hunter was.
Cross-IP (Intellectual Property)
- Dean thinks incorporating other Blizzard IP so far (Diablo) was „just okay“.
- The team went light with the Diablo content, Dean thinks they’d go harder on the overall impact next time to see how it does.
- Bringing in non-Blizzard IP would cost the team a lot of money, which means they’d likely have to do an expansion theme around it.
- Dean isn’t sure if the team is really interested in doing a whole expansion across IPs.
Card Packs
- Mass pack opening is on the to do list.